Google says robots are going to be bigger than search

AP/Tony AvelarWhat drives a driverless car? Machine learning. Machine learning is the hot new thing in Silicon Valley. In an interview with the Times, Google cloud executive Urs Hölzle predicted that the business of renting out machine learning capabilities will one day overtake the company’s advertising revenue. To put that in perspective, search ads made Google an eye-popping $16.4 billion in profits in 2015. Machine learning is a branch of computer science where algorithms can train themselves in pattern recognition. Crucially, it doesn’t require a programmer to orient the algorithm to what works or doesn’t work in a given domain — it can learn on its own. The most famous recent example is AlphaGo, the bot that just beat a human champion in the ancient, seemingly impossible to master game of Go — where there…